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Spam - VM's filter is useless!

timbo42
Dialled in

I'm so sick & tired of VM's utterly useless Spam filter! VM is happy to allow any messages about Viagra, Bitcoin scams, phishing attacks through, but blocks many real e-mails! I've had 20 scam e-mails in the last 3 days trying to get me to renew Norton anti-virus (which I don't have). I mark them as Spam each time, but the system never learns!

As I said the system also blocks proper e-mails sometimes - e-mails from a Dutch company I deal with are always blocked, no matter how many times I mark them as not Spam. I even had an individual e-mail from a UK company acknowledging an order classed as spam.

Its useless, and its always been useless, and it never gets better! I wouldn't mind if the system ever learnt - isn't that what modern sophisticated systems are supposed to do???

133 REPLIES 133

Yes they had a very good reason for moving away from Google’s system, which was that Google pulled the plug on the offering (I vaguely recall it being with quite a short notice), leaving providers having to scramble to put alternatives in place quickly.

Anyhow would you like to guess how Gmail is so much better at spam filtering? The free gmail service is funded by them basically reading every single email you send through it, analysing the contents and then using that information to sell your details to advertisers - how do you think that Google make money? They have a vested interest in having really advanced (and expensive) methods of analysing email contents and, as a byproduct, are very good at filtering spam.

Hi DeeEmBee,

Yes - I open the scum-spam to take part of the address that's possibly constant but I ensure my email program / app doesn't load images.

Unfortunately, the scummers are often using lots of differing addresses 🤔 .... so I use a similar filter but for the contents of the title / heading. Combine that with sending any scum-spam to SpamCop .. and I'm currently only getting 2 to 4 crud-mails every other day. Here's the Heading filter ...

 
 

 

 

Another ntlworld email account here getting hit by spam regularly now.

I have a separate domain and email for my important stuff, but keep the ntlworld address alive for the less important stuff, and to give out if I don't want to use my "real" address. And it's what VM have for me...

Like the suggestion of forwarding to gmail to filter out the junk a bit more. Could then forward the gmail on to another address on my domain...

So, what if you forward VM mail to gmail, which then forwards it back to your VM account? Will it go round in circles forever, or figure it out? I know MS Exchange used to figure such loops out many years ago. Anyone tried it with VM accounts? What could go wrong?? 🙂

 

I have recently started to see huge numbers of this spam getting through the filters - these are generally fake renewal for anti-virus products.   In fairness this is very difficult to stop as there is no single sending domain or other common feature to block.

I have analysed the emails and found that in the envelope the localpart of the email address (the string before the @ symbol) appears to be a randomly generated 9 character string of lowercase characters.  I have therefore created a filter that uses the condition "Envelope", Header "From" and Part "Localpart" have applied a regex like this:

[a-z]{9}

I have configured an action to send matched conditions to my spam folder.

Since I applied this filter ALL of the spam gets sent to my spam folder and there are very few false positives.

 

Sigma
Fibre optic

So far this solution has worked perfectly for me: -

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/My-Spam-solution/td-p/4582197

I also added a colour flag to posts caught by this filter and so far, in the last 30 hours or so, these are the results: -

25 new emails are in my spam folder. 24 of them were caught by this filter. 1 of them was caught by VM's own filtering. 0 legitimate emails have been mistakenly identified as spam. 0 spam emails have made it into my inbox.

Before I implemented that filter I was getting at least a dozen spam emails a day in my inbox, and sometimes a lot more than that, and they seemed to arrive in batches.

Hopefully the spammers don't read this forum and make the necessary adjustments so that this filter no longer works, lol.


@stumpyuk wrote:

I have recently started to see huge numbers of this spam getting through the filters - these are generally fake renewal for anti-virus products.   In fairness this is very difficult to stop as there is no single sending domain or other common feature to block.

I have analysed the emails and found that in the envelope the localpart of the email address (the string before the @ symbol) appears to be a randomly generated 9 character string of lowercase characters.  I have therefore created a filter that uses the condition "Envelope", Header "From" and Part "Localpart" have applied a regex like this:

[a-z]{9}

I have configured an action to send matched conditions to my spam folder.

Since I applied this filter ALL of the spam gets sent to my spam folder and there are very few false positives.

 


@stumpyuk this sounds fabulous!  

I too was having a nightmare all of a sudden with spam and in the end, decided to redirect mail to gmail to sift for me.

Not sure why their spam filters are so much better but so far not one dodgy emails has made it through to my inbox.  


@Sigma wrote:

So far this solution has worked perfectly for me: -

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/My-Spam-solution/td-p/4582197

I also added a colour flag to posts caught by this filter and so far, in the last 30 hours or so, these are the results: -

25 new emails are in my spam folder. 24 of them were caught by this filter. 1 of them was caught by VM's own filtering. 0 legitimate emails have been mistakenly identified as spam. 0 spam emails have made it into my inbox.

Before I implemented that filter I was getting at least a dozen spam emails a day in my inbox, and sometimes a lot more than that, and they seemed to arrive in batches.

Hopefully the spammers don't read this forum and make the necessary adjustments so that this filter no longer works, lol.


@Sigma glad it’s working for you - unfortunately it only recognised 7 out of about 150 spam emails for me…

I’m using gmail to sift them now and it’s correctly identified all spam so far so feeling relieved (although frustrated I couldn’t get it to work here).

welsh1lad
On our wavelength

Hi all , 

  It would appear that the security emails are coming from a compromised smtp mail relay server in In Dallas , by changing your email filter to filter out headers with the following date.

Date: Wed4 Oct 2020 18:44:07 -0400

 Check your spam box , for the headers that have this exact date & Time . 

 

 

Set a filter in outlook to move to spam anything with "Wed4 Oct 2020" in the header, 100% success rate so far, good work buddy!

What is SPAM and how to protect yourself from it

Your Security SPAM protection | Virgin Media

Virgin States - We also filter all email viruses out of your Virgin Media email

Hope that is true.

 MY antivirus  has a mail protection feature which checks emails for virus also.

If I send a virgin  email via thunderbird it is tagged at the bottom of the email message- virus checked by my antivirus, but does not work with virgin webmail, yet does work with outlook web mail, this protects the person you are sending the email too.

So if there was a virus in any email sending or receiving does virgin detect and block the email.?

I use an antivirus with email protection so that should also help to catch any virus.

alf28